I did not do very well at all (understatement) about posting once a week. I will try harder next year, um, tomorrow? It has been fun, 2011, but since you are about to run, GO and let 2012 be sweeter and nicer to all of us.
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF YOU.
SDSue
I am going to try this to see if I can get myself blogging more!
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/how-to-sign-up-postaday-postaweek/
Tomorrow is July 4, Independence Day for America. Independence from the rule of England, for the white european people group that escaped from Britain’s rule and enforced their own kind of slavery on the native Americans of the land. However, Native Americans celebrate July 4th also, the same way that the white european Americans do. We are all grateful to those that make our lives free from the tyranny of a dictator. However, this discussion is leading to many things that I dislike discussing so it will end with “I am forever grateful to be an American.”
I have noticed as I have gotten older that I have become a little more cynical and isolated. I do have hopes for America, for my Native brothers and sisters, my grandchildren, the future of our little business, but not the starry eyed “oh it’s all going to be WONderful” hope that I had when I was 30. I do still believe in the dream of all people being at peace with one another but only when Jesus reigns. My cynicism is about the state of the minds and attitudes of the people in my country. I see Greed, dishonesty, hate, corruption, and hypocrisy with a clearer eye now than I ever did before. Is it because the world is getting worse or did I finally bring my head out of my dream state? Biblically I can give you lots of reason for the state of things today, but in my “badass” attitude lately I won’t, you need to go and find it for yourself. As I look back over the last 30 years of my life I see a lot of brokenness, hurt, being taken advantage of, and even remorse that I did not stand up for myself and my family more. As a newly married woman I was determined to make the world a better place with my wonderful husband by my side doing the same. Instead we ran up against the real world and all its ugliness and pain. HOWEVER we had and still have JESUS to keep our perspective clear. Without my Lord and Savior Jesus I would have committed suicide a long time ago. The world is a harsh place to live and as you get older it gets harsher.
Thus the isolationism. I have found that I need my quiet space more often than ever before. I need to sit and listen to the birds sing and the fountain flow more now than when I was a younger woman. I need the quiet clicking of knitting needles or the clack of the loom to soothe me. The whir of the spinning wheel keeps me connected with the inner prayers that I have given to Jesus over the state of the world, the people in the world that I love and myself. I am a VERY social person. I love people. They excite me and give me reason to work and live. BUT I also need my quiet time alone. It is a very interesting thing that as I get older and get to know more and more people (purely because I don’t know a stranger and add up all the years I’ve been alive with all the “friends” I’ve met) the more I want to be alone. I suspect this is the typical problem that every woman faces: BALANCE. I just don’t always know how to balance my life. I am getting better though.
So, we get to the Fourth of July tomorrow. 32 years ago this time of year was wrought with excitement and gratitude for I was about to marry the man of my dreams. In just a short few days we will celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary. He’s still wonderful, but we have learned how to toughen our skin a little more, to be more cautious about the people around us and to question things like we never have before. I suppose this is the aging process. I don’t know, never having gotten this far before, age-wise. However, we are still very much in love, we like each other a lot, we understand one another and there are few surprises anymore. There is still a lot of excitement and joy though!
I see myself getting tougher and looser at the same time as I age. I see the “tough” being telling it like it is, being totally honest and not hypocritical and the “loose” being live and let live more and not fighting the non-essentials. I see myself being more reliant on Jesus and His ability to get me through the tough times as well as the good times. And I see myself being more in balance. It almost sounds like I am dreaming again!!
Peace
Serenity
Wow, what happened to the month of June!! Well, I know for me it has been busy. Just some of the things that have happened this month: June 1 we had to lay off most of our employees at our business because we barely had enough money to pay them on the first. The 14th of June I fell outside a local store and hit my ribcage against a very hard metal railing. I am still in pain. My husband still hasn’t gotten a paycheck from our business, this has been going on for 3 months. I have been working more hours to make up for him not getting a paycheck. My husband’s mother has a bout of not eating and being dizzy and confused that lasts almost two weeks. We finally figure out she has been missing some of her medications that made her not hungry so she did not eat. She is now receiving in home health care and new meds. June 15 my husband applies for two jobs. First job gives him an interview and said it would take at least a month for the “boss” to make a decision. Second job wants him to take some tests before they consider him for an interview. Meanwhile (June 18) I get an idea to send out a mailing to some gift shops across the US to see if anyone would like to buy some of the jewelry we sell. I sent out 29 packets of info and one pair of earrings to these shops on June 21. We have already added 3 new accounts to our business!!! Yeah! Something good is happening. This coming weekend is the Fourth of July and I am glad that June is almost over!!!
After falling down outside that business this month, I decided that I needed a safer way to walk. I decided that a walker might help, but the way I fall down without any obstacle in my path I decided I had better design something with a roll cage. So here is the idea I came up with. It is not copyrighted or patented!! HAHAHAHA I’ve had several people ask for one when I make it, but I will leave that task to the younger generation!!!! The roll cage does need some serious padding.
Sue's roll cage walker
I usually blog more on my other blog, Warped and Weft Behind? but tonight I will blog here. We have had Spring and then Summer and now Spring again for the last 3 weeks. I am not really sure if South Dakota knows what season we are really in, unless it is Flood Season. Last week on June 9, Rapid City had a day of remembering the huge flood that devastated the town in 1972. I had never heard of the Flood in ’72 until moving here and boy, what a mess that flood made of this beautiful city. Now Rapid City has a Greenway all through the city along the Creek. Rapid Creek is more like a river, although nothing like the Missouri. These last few weeks the Creek has been very high, flowing over its banks in various parts of town and I am very thankful for the Greenway so that no homes here have to experience what our friends are experiencing in Bismarck, Mandan, Pierre and Fort Pierre. Right now the thunder is rolling outside my window, but I can move pretty quick even for a fat lady, to shut the windows if it rains. We had a thunderstorm last night with no rain, not good, but this one has the smell of rain in it. The wind has picked up also.
The economy has been deadly on many people in town. We just started our new business, Native Life Designs and had to lay off some of our production crew, which was devastating to us. My husband is looking for other work, so we can pay the mortgage, and I am taking over many duties at the office. I love being at work with the ladies that work for us, but when the money is short then it is not as fun. But God knows what we need and when and He will provide, even if I want Him to hurry up about it.
Our son is settled in his new Army post and his broken leg has healed quite well. We are looking forward to seeing him more often now that he is stationed in the US. He enjoys his new post and his new friends where he is stationed so we are happy for him also.
I have been knitting up a bunch of half finished projects which is good, so I can go on to the half finished weaving and spinning that I need to do! I also have a felting/needle felting project that I am gearing up for, but that info will have to come in Warped and Weft Behind?
Thunder storm is upon us, so I will post this quickly.
The birds are singing, there are new birds winging into the bird feeder every day (not winter birds), the grass is really green and already been mowed once and there are buds on the trees and sprouting little flowers in the ground. However, it is May in South Dakota. We have “rain/snow showers possible this evening” type of weather forecasts STILL! Everyone seems a little cautious to pronounce this “Spring” yet, even though the Proms are over, Finals week at the University is over and graduation is a week or two away.
Since the Voles and Gophers have weeded out my flower beds of all the flowers I now have a few little patches of leftovers, that they didn’t like, coming up out of the ground. I found a grape hyacinth this morning and several irises I didn’t know existed sprouting in the barren earth that the Voles left. It’s nice they left a little bit of color for us this “Spring”. I am so ready to get out my bicycle, plant pots of flowers and hang baskets of flowers.
Hope it doesn’t snow tonight….
We had a bake sale today at the Yarn store for the benefit of the MS Society. My friend has been diagnosed with Multiple Scolorsis and we are going on a walk next weekend. We also needed to raise some money, so we raised about 60 dollars today and had goodies left over to sell again on Monday.
We started out by setting up our spinning wheels outside the shop with the table of bread, cookies, bars and brownies between them. We attracted a lot of attention, but it was in the 40′s and cloudy so people were in a hurry to get inside someplace. Finally it began to rain, so we had to move indoors. We stood under the furnace vents to warm up and then finished our spinning. We did have people come inside to buy some more baked goods. It was a fun adventure, but very chilly, especially for Spring. Next week we are walking about a mile or two and we are praying for NO RAIN!
If science and religion share a common language, it must be cosmology, say two men who think deeply about all three.
Cosmology, the study of the universe, has been the life’s work of Ted and George Gull, two brothers who grew up in Edgemont to become, respectively, an astrophysicist and a mechanical engineer.
For the Gull brothers, exploring the evolution of the universe not only answers questions about where we are in creation, how we got here and what else is out there — but also about what we human beings believe about a creator and how we relate to it.
“You can’t tell me that science and religion don’t mix. It’s all together,” said Ted Gull, who sees something that some might call “God’s signature” in the physics of the universe, the similarities among the galaxies and the patterns that play themselves out in the heavens.
As an astrophysicist with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Ted studies the stars using the Hubble Space Telescope that he helped develop with a team of astronomers and engineers from across the country. His younger brother, George, helps build some of the sophisticated instruments that make it possible for Ted and other astronomers to do their work — what George calls “toys for astronomers.”
Wearing a western-cut black leather vest and black denim jeans, George Gull might pass for an Edgemont-area rancher. Instead, he is the lead engineer for the FORCAST instrument at Cornell University. FORCAST is a dual-channel infrared digital camera mounted on a telescope in the rear of a specially outfitted Boeing 747 airplane, a flying observatory called the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA.
He describes his most recent “toy” as a very big, super-sophisticated version of an optical digital camera that takes pictures of infrared energy from distant galaxies. Even more simply put, it is a “light bucket” that astronomers stick up above the Earth’s atmosphere to collect a bucket full of the photons that have been streaming past for millions of year, but which have never been captured as images for the human eye to see before this.
“To me, that’s a gift of the creator, however you define it,” George said.
Their work involves the vastness of the universe, and, when the two scientists were back in Rapid City last week visiting their mother, they gave audiences at The Journey Museum and Canyon Lake United Methodist Church a glimpse at the time and space dimensions in which they work. They also spoke to astronomy and physics classes at Spearfish High School.
The telescopes they build and use have shown scientists that there are hundreds of billions of stars, and perhaps 50 billion planets, in the Milky Way galaxy alone, inviting people to “draw your own conclusions about how many of those might support life,” Ted Gull said. Those telescopes take images from other galaxies that are as distant as 13 billion light years away from Earth. “And they are not even at the edge of our universe,” he said.
But the Gulls also work a little closer to home – at least in the same solar system in which they live.
If you happen to be one of those former elementary school students who was sorry to see Pluto removed from the list of planets in our solar system, said George, blame Ted Gull. His big brother was one of the astronomers who proved that Pluto doesn’t technically fit the description of a planet.
“I helped demote it,” Ted admitted of Pluto, after apologizing to any school teachers in the crowd who have had to revise their astronomy curriculum from nine planets down to eight.
On Sunday at Canyon Lake UMC, retired teacher Del Harbaugh was in a roomful of people who turned out to hear the Gulls.
Harbaugh taught math at Edgemont High School in 1962. Ted Gull was one of his students, but he wasn’t taking credit for an impressive astronomy career.
“The best thing I can say is that I didn’t get in the way of it,” he said. “I hope I didn’t talk as far above his head then as he is above mine here today.”
As active Methodists, the Gull brothers believe that scientific knowledge leads them closer to their creator, not further away from it. Whether it’s the big bang theory, the mysteries of dark matter, “red shift” evidence of the universe expanding, or how powerful earthquakes contribute to the life processes on our planet, “knowledge is power,” they say.
George Gull acknowledges that the pursuit of science may make some Christians – including some of his own relatives — uncomfortable. On the other hand, his fellow scientists, some of whom are atheists, don’t understand his embrace of the Christian faith or his belief in God.
For him, there is plenty of common ground between science and religion.
Faith is an attempt to bring human understanding to the concept of God, and, by necessity, religions limit God to what the human mind can grasp.
“Absolutely, all religions box God in. God is bigger than the Bible,” George said. “I can’t put my God in a box.”
Cosmology also allows them to explore that question that is central to so many faiths: Where are we going?
“It is only challenging our personal beliefs, looking within oneself and throughout our environment, which by all means includes that
directly around us and the universe, that we can hypothesize where we are going,” Ted Gull said.
Irene Gull noticed that her sons didn’t attempt to answer that question Sunday.
“They never really answered that question, did they? That’s because they don’t have any better idea than the rest of us,” she said.
Ted Gull said that’s a question for which he has no solid answer, either scientific or religious, but that as a man of faith and a man of science, he’ll never stop asking it.
“An afterlife must exist, but what, how, where? The universe will continue, but in what form? By faith and by scientific process we try to understand.”
Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8424 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com
LaNiyah Baily is 6 yrs old and already the victim of obesity attacks. She is overweight and she has been called Fatty, Fatso and Elephant by her Day Car Providers and the children in her Day Care. She decided to write a book. Below is the transcript of the interview from NPR. Go here to listen to the interview.
Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
MICHELE MARTIN, host:
As we said a few minutes ago, along with fighting bullying, first lady Michelle Obama has also focused much of her attention on trying to promote healthy eating and exercise for kids.
But as adults well know, it can be very hard dealing with rude comments about weight. It might be even tougher when your weight results from medical issues and you’re just six years old.
Six-year-old LaNiyah Bailey has faced that struggle, but she decided not to just sit around and feel sorry for herself. With her parents’ help, she has published a new book about her struggles with weight. It’s called, “Not Fat Because I Wanna Be.”
And LaNiyah Bailey is with us now, along with her mom, LaToya White, who helped her daughter with the book, and her dad, Sango Bailey. They’re all here from member station WBEZ in Chicago.
Thank you all so much for joining us.
Ms. LaTOYA WHITE: Thank you for having us here.
Mr. SANGO BAILEY: (unintelligible)
Ms. LaNIYAH BAILEY (Author): Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: Your mom was telling us earlier that sometimes people can be kind of mean when people are a little heavy. Has that ever happened to you?
Ms. BAILEY: Yes. People used to call me names like, you’re a big elephant (unintelligible).
MARTIN: And was it kids calling names, or did grownups sometime say mean things, too?
Ms. BAILEY: Both.
MARTIN: Both kids and grownups would say mean things. And Ms. White, LaToya, when did this start? I mean, did this start in Pre-K? When did you start noticing that kids were saying mean things?
Ms. WHITE: Well, it actually started when she was in Pre-K. The first instance was when she was at a daycare. I picked her up, and the next day she cried and cried and cried, and said she didn’t want to go back. She told me that the daycare provider had been calling her fat girl and telling her that she was a pig, and all these nasty things.
MARTIN: The daycare provider?
Ms. WHITE: The provider, yes.
MARTIN: Who presumably is an adult.
Ms. WHITE: Is an adult, yes.
MARTIN: Okay. That must have been very hard to deal with.
Ms. WHITE: It was humiliating for her, and to see my child crying and, you know, not wanting to go back, it made me feel really bad because I couldn’t do anything for her, because I was a working – you know, I’m a working mom. Of course, I couldn’t keep her myself. So I then called the daycare provider, and I asked her exactly what happened.
And she said, well, that’s a normal thing for me. She said I grew up with people calling me fat, so – she was like I called her fatso. I didn’t think anything was wrong with it. And I’m like, well, you know, self-confidence is built at an early age. So that’s something that you shouldn’t tell a young kid.
So she didn’t think anything was wrong with it, but immediately, we pulled her from that provider and put her someplace else.
MARTIN: Was that the lowest moment for you?
Ms. WHITE: No. That was the first instance. I would say the last instance was the worst. When we put her in another daycare, some of the kids had alienated her and started teasing her, calling her elephant, and telling her she looked pregnant, and all these things. And when we went to the provider for that daycare and told her what was going on, she said she was going to nip in the bud, and never did. These things still continued.
And every day, LaNiyah would come home crying, and it was just terrible. So I actually approached the parent of that child. I felt like I had to go above and beyond the daycare provider, because she wasn’t getting us the results that we needed. So when I went to that parent and I told her exactly what happened, she said, well, my child would never do that.
She said, okay. Well, what I’ll do is I’ll take my daughter out to dinner and I’ll talk to her. And she said that her daughter told her that, yes, mom, I did call LaNiyah an elephant. She said, and the reason why I did it was because when people use to tease me. She basically said she saw herself in LaNiyah. So the things that people used to do to her, it carried over and she basically had taken everything that people said to her and put it on someone else. That’s another…
MARTIN: So perpetuating it.
Ms. WHITE: …effect of being bullied.
MARTIN: Sort or perpetuating the cycle, there.
Ms. WHITE: Exactly.
MARTIN: Yeah. Dad, what about you? What’s been the worst moment for you?
Mr. BAILEY: One day I was dropping her off, and she started crying. And I said, baby, what’s wrong? And she said, I don’t want to go. I talked to her, and she said that she didn’t want to go in because the girls were being mean. They didn’t want to play with her. And me, I’m not as calm as mom is. I was ready to fight and start hurting people that was hurting my baby.
And, you know, I talked with the provider and I told her that, you know, something needs to change, because bullying is a cycle. And it was just kind of hard to see your child crying and you know that they’re hurting and that there’s really nothing you can do, per se, to stop the pain.
I think that was the lowest point when I really got fed up and I was ready to just go to war and do what I have to do to protect my child.
MARTIN: Mm-hmm. LaNiyah, can you just explain for people how that makes you feel when somebody says something like that?
Ms. BAILEY: It makes me feel sad.
MARTIN: How did you get the idea to write a book?
Ms. BAILEY: When I came home, I went upstairs in my room and said I want to write a book. And my mom told me that’s good, and I told her what I wanted in my book and she wrote it down.
MARTIN: If you’re just joining us, this is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. We’re speaking with six year old LaNiyah Bailey about her new book, titled “Not Fat Because I Wanna Be.” Her mom, LaToya White, and her dad, Sango Bailey, are also with us.
LaToya White, mom, I understand that one of the compelling issues here and one of the things that you also wanted to help people understand is that this isn’t a solely a matter of her diet.
Ms. WHITE: Exactly.
MARTIN: Can you talk about that a little bit more?
Ms. WHITE: People have the perception that when you’re overweight, that it comes from an unhealthy lifestyle, which isn’t true in her case. She has a protruding belly, and one of the things that contributed to that is a swollen colon which was caused by constipation. And right now, she’s on medication, and has been on medication for that for about two years.
And we’ve been testing for maybe the past year and a half for different things. She was diagnosed with something called polydipsea before, which is also a term, like water diabetes type of thing that a lot of people may not know about. And that makes a person drink water or any kind of fluid, like, a lot. So they’re retaining a lot of fluid.
And right now, they’re testing her for something called leptin receptor. It’s a hormone that doesn’t tell the brain when the body is full. So that person constantly is eating. So that’s also helping pack on the pounds.
MARTIN: So there are medical issues that have contributed to her weight, and I presume that she wanted to write this book to help other kids understand how it feels to be teased and bullied and so forth.
Ms. WHITE: Right.
MARTIN: What about you? Why have you wanted to help her with this project?
Ms. WHITE: Well, I thought it would be therapeutic for her. I think that with her telling the world how she feels about what she went through, it’ll help her embrace herself more. And it’ll also help other people understand that you can’t judge a book by its cover.
MARTIN: Can I ask both of you, though – and dad, can I ask you this question, as well, if you don’t mind? There are those who would say that, look, adults can be mean, as we have just discussed. But kids can be mean, and part of being a child is learning how to deal with mean people. That’s part of your job as parents, is to help her deal with situations that are not always going to be pleasant.
Can you just talk a little bit about that?
Mr. BAILEY: Okay. Well, the first thing that we tried to teach LaNiyah when it started happening was that, you know, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. We taught her that that really wasn’t true, because sometimes words can be harder than a fist. And when she started grasping the concept of that, she started getting better about it.
It does go back since time started, but it seems like nobody has ever really found a way to stop it. And with society the way it is now, kids are taking problems – matters into their own hands, and that’s something that I think if more kids and more adults, you know, sat down and talked about issues like that, it may not get to the point where you have kids taking weapons to school and trying to handle it by themselves.
So you want to protect your baby, but you know that you can’t protect them from everything. And that’s one thing that we try to instill in her, that no matter what, as long as she has her family, you know, her parents and God by her side, nobody can ever hurt her because we’ll always be there to protect her.
MARTIN: Dad, what do you want people to draw from the book?
Mr. BAILEY: I want them to understand that, you know, like mom said, you can’t just look at somebody and just think that you know. And it’s part of our DNA. We all do it, you know. I caught myself doing it even after, you know, my own child was going through it. You see somebody, and the first thing you think of was a negative thing. And it’s just part of us. So I want people to try to consciously change their habits, you know.
When you look at somebody, don’t look at them and look like they’re disgusting or they’re nasty. Just look at them and know that they’re a person just like you are. They have the same feelings you do, and they have their own issues, you know. Everybody has problems, and teasing them or pointing at them, it doesn’t make anything better. It just makes it worse.
MARTIN: And LaToya, what about you? What would you like people to draw from the book?
Ms. WHITE: Just because someone is overweight doesn’t mean that they live unhealthy, that they have unhealthy eating habits, or that they have an unhealthy lifestyle.
MARTIN: And LaNiyah, I’m going to give you the last word. So what is the most important thing you would like people to think about when they think about you and when they read your book?
Ms. BAILEY: Bullying is not cool.
MARTIN: Okay. I think that says it all. OK.
(Soundbite of laughter)
MARTIN: Thank you, LaNiyah.
Ms. BAILEY: You’re welcome.
MARTIN: LaNiyah Bailey is the author of a new book called “Not Fat Because I Wanna Be.” It’s based on her personal experience of dealing with people who made fun of her because of her weight.
Also with us, LaToya White, she is LaNiyah’s mother, and Sango Bailey, who is LaNiyah’s father. And they were all with us from NPR member station WBEZ in Chicago.
Thank you all so much for joining us.
Ms. WHITE: Thank you for having us.
Mr. BAILEY: Thank you.
Ms. BAILEY: Thank you. Bye-bye.
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In my head I am 17 years old. I’m invincible, courageous, out to save the world from itself and I am strong. I am agile and flexible. I am beautiful and ready to conquer all my fears. I look like this:
Ahhh, but when I look into the mirror this is who I see: WHO IS THAT OLD LADY?
I am not invincible, I am wiser though. I am not out to save the world from itself, but I still am strong and courageous. I am not flexible and agile, although I could be more flexible and more agile, if I tried harder! I am still beautiful and am conquering all my fears. I have come a long way in 40 plus years. It helps that as we age we also get wiser and more calm. My goal this last year was to experience calm and to work for peace in my life and I have succeeded in that.
So, now I am ready for winter to be over and for spring to come so I can feel like I am 17 again but with a wiser more mature attitude about life.
Shalom!
